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Get Up To Speed with OER

This is a self-paced tutorial for faculty and staff to learn about Open Educational Resources - what they are, how to find and evaluate them, how to adapt and create them, and how to handle the copyright and technical implications.

Questions for Reflection

  1. Please set aside twenty minutes to dive down the rabbit hole of OER web sites and search tools that we have collected in the OER Guide. Explore the different lists and repositories collected under the different tabs of the guide. Choose at least two from those lists, and try out their search functions. See if you can find out whether they have a peer review system, and where they get their content from. Find an OER and keep it open in a tab of your browser, or at least bookmark it. You will use it in the next question.

  2. Use the Rubric for Evaluating OER to evaluate the OER that you found while completing the previous question.

  3. Think back to a time when the learning materials you had to use were less than ideal. What was the matter with them? How could they have been better? What kinds of improvements would you have liked to make? Are these improvements the kinds of improvements that could have been made fairly easily if you had the permission to do it and some simple devices and software? Or would you have needed to bring in specialized tools and expertise?